


Did You Think Immunity to Time Loops was the Only Thing Paul Stamets got from the Tardigrade?

by TUNiU



Series: Tardigrades are Extremophiles [1]
Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Assault, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Medical Inaccuracies, Mummies, Not Really Character Death, Zombies, but he is blind and almost dead at the time, hugh culber is in there for a few sentences, so its not his fault, tilly says the f-word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:41:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27035107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: The tardigrade DNA has an unexpected affect on Paul when he's attacked by a hostile animal. Featuring: angst, horror, and then a sentence or two of comedy.
Relationships: Hugh Culber/Paul Stamets, Paul Stamets & Sylvia Tilly
Series: Tardigrades are Extremophiles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991209
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	Did You Think Immunity to Time Loops was the Only Thing Paul Stamets got from the Tardigrade?

Ensign Silvia Tilly found herself staring at the body of Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stamets. It had all been going so well. It had just been her, Paul, and a small group of ecologists surveying the planet for food, and a place for the USS Discovery to make a base. They were now 900 years in the future, the massive Federation was gone, and they had no idea who were the friendly aliens and who were the aliens that would kill them and take the ship for themselves. Captain Saru had decided that they needed to rest and create a colony world, at least until they made a treaty with some friendly species that would let the crew share resources. 

Paul was the one who had chosen this planet from the data catalogued by the various probes Discovery sent out. He needed a planet where he could grow another colony of his _Prototaxites Stellavatori_ mushrooms for use in ship functions. Tilly had thought the required light spectrum for greatest fungal growth made the planet’s atmosphere look too red for her taste, but she wasn’t the mycologist, and beauty was in the eye of the beholder.

With Discovery in orbit, they had all beamed down to the planet; a few teams strategically placed for maximum results. It was a lot of scanning, and measuring, and picture taking, with some goofing off as the crew enjoyed their time in the tall grass. (They might have made a crop circle or two.)

Then the beast attacked. It was some kind of massive quadruped and Tilly couldn’t tell from how she was running, but it looked like it had too many teeth. She wasn’t going to stop to look. Paul ran beside her. The other scientists had run the opposite way, lucky them.

“Why, didn’t, this, show, up, on, the, scans?” Tilly whined as she ran. She fumbled with her pocket, grabbed her communicator, and flipped it open. “Discovery! Beam us up!” she ordered.

The communicator spewed garbled snow sounds.

“There’s your answer!” Paul yelled. “Interference.”

“Always, with, the, inter, fucking, ference!”

Suddenly, Paul veered into her and tripped her into the ground. She yelped. He screamed. Tilly watched as the animal caught Paul around the waist with its teeth and bounded off past her. She ran after it but it quickly out paced her. She was left following its trampled wake through the grasslands.

She found Paul, most definitely dead. His clothes were slashed apart in several places, and most puzzling was the fact he was utterly desiccated. He was a mummy in a Starfleet uniform. Tilly stared. She stared a long time until she threw up, falling to her knees.

Tilly kept her head down, looking at her own pile of sick, just so she wouldn’t see Paul’s body anymore. Her communicator was still in her hand. The cover hinge was now bent back out of alignment from where she had slammed into the ground. She clicked the button, it chirped with the affirmative ping signal from the ship. 

“Discovery!” she croaked out. “There’s been an attack, Lt. Cmdr. Stamets is dead.”

 _“We can’t get a lock on his transponder,”_ the transporter operator told her.

She looked at Paul’s body. His badge was missing from his clothes, torn off and destroyed in the attack. She forced herself to crawl to his corpse, close enough that her own transponder field would cover him as well. “Beam us both,” she said.

The grass under her knees disappeared to be replaced by the white floors of the ship’s sickbay. Doctor Pollard kneeled down and scanned Paul. Tilly didn’t see the point. The rest of the medical team stood back, waiting for instructions. They weren’t needed. Someone helped Tilly to her feet and sat her on a bed with her back to the room.

“Someone needs to tell Doctor Culber,” she told the doctor examining her. The doctor held her chin and ran a dermal regenerator over the scrapes she must have gotten when Paul pushed her out of the way.

Behind her, a body bag zipped.

* * *

Tilly stood in the freezing morgue room. Paul’s naked body lay in a zipped black bag in an open drawer. He hadn’t been immediately preserved for his funeral rites. The ship ran on a spore drive and Paul was the only crewman with the implants and DNA needed to run the spore drive. And Tilly was Paul’s assistant, she knew the implants better than anyone other than Doctor Hugh Culber. He was the one who had installed them into Paul to save him pain from the interface. Tilly was the one who volunteered to salvage the technology to spare Hugh the pain of dismembering his own husband.

It wasn’t kind and it wasn’t fair, but Captain Saru needed it done. Saru was quite gentle when he gave the command. Unspoken was the knowledge that since Discovery needed the spore drive, now more than ever in this hazardous future, someone would need to get injected with a tardigrade compound synthesized from Paul’s blood, and then receive the wetware interface implants. 

Tilly wondered if it would be her. She knew the systems better than anyone now. 

She unzipped the black bag all the way down to his arms. She didn’t open it yet, keeping the flaps where they lay. Instead she took a moment and turned back to her tray of tools. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything.

Bone saw, tissue sampler, collection trays.

The bag rustled behind her. Tilly froze. All the hair rose on her neck. Sweat broke out on her skin. She knew not to turn around because the body bag was rustling behind her. A mummified hand brushed against her shoulder.

Tilly screamed and ran.

While she had never heard or read about a zombie outbreak in all of Starfleet history, Tilly was no fool. When the freakishly reanimated mummified corpse of Paul rose up and out of his body bag and started chasing her, she ran. It wasn't a very fast chase, and in truth she quickly outran Paul. She stopped when she was two corridors down from where she had last heard his dried feet shuffling along the deck. She leaned past the corner, looking back the way she came. Paul sure was taking his time, chasing after her to eat her brains. She was just glad no one ever came down this way, due to its proximity to the morgue. As long as Paul was only chasing her, and as long as he seemed to be taking his time about it, she could think of some solution to this problem. She needed a fire axe. That’s what killed zombies--decapitation.

Slowly, she crept back the way she came, ready at any moment to run. She ran her hand along the corridor wall at the right height to meet the panel she needed. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off the distance, in case Paul came at her. Eventually her fingers met the depressed button and she opened the emergency case embedded in the wall. In addition to all the spare phasers and medical kits inside the hold, there was a good old fashioned axe: wooden handle, metal head--good for opening any stuck door.

Tilly found Paul slowly, repeatedly, walking into a wall. He walked two steps forward, bounced back, and did it again. She held out the axe in front of her, ready for the moment he pounced.

"Paul?" she called out to him. If there was any time to call the boss by his first name it was when he was a zombie.

He didn't hear her. He didn't stop walking into the wall. Tilly approached him, closer and closer, until she stood almost next to him. He lurched at her. 

She got an unwanted view of his dried husk of a face as it came upon her. He was blind--his eyes withered away from their sockets. His arms wrapped around her shoulders. But it was a slight hold. All his muscle mass was gone with his water weight. His wrinkled lips traced their way along her hair line.

She froze, holding the axe out to the side. It was super gross.

"What are you doing?" she cried out.

He wasn't attempting to eat her brains, so that was nice, but it was definitely inappropriate work-place behavior. And it got worse when Paul licked her face. 

"Okay! NO!" Tilly grabbed him by the forearms and pushed him back from her face. "That is super gross, you zombie!" The axe fell to the floor with a clang.

He leaned towards her face as she leaned away. Her hands squeezed his arms so tight she could feel the implants along his withered skin. She looked at where the implants dug into her palms. Then she looked at Paul’s blind mummy face. 

"Maybe you're not a zombie?" 

He didn’t answer her. He just leaned forward against her hold, trying to reach her.

Abruptly and with great determination, Tilly grabbed Paul by the hand and led him down the corridor. They were in the industrial section of the ship, near the morgue but more importantly near the large scale replicator units. She held his hand the entire way into the Fabrication Department, where two crewmen stood working. They stared when the two of them walked in. Tilly mustered up all the indignation she felt at being licked by her zombie boss, and said, "back to work!" 

She didn't outrank them, being only an ensign, but they quickly turned back to their stations. Leading a mummified man, naked--but for her uniform jacket tied around his waist for decency--around by the hand just had that effect on people. She stalked over to an empty console, still holding onto Paul with one hand even as he tried to approach the crewmen.

"Okay, if you're not dead..." She typed with one hand, bringing up fabrication patterns for a large cistern, then combining that with the pattern for water. On the receiving pad in front of the console a large metal tub materialized filled with liquid. Even blind, using whatever sense he had left, Paul seemed to stare at the liquid. 

"Here, you go," Tilly said softly. She led him to the edge of the tub and tipped him in with a splash.

What happened next was, without a doubt the most grossest thing she'd ever seen. Paul slowly rose to the top of the water. As he bobbed there, his skin puffed up. His eyes embiggened back in his sockets, his eyelids returned. All the wrinkles and desiccation disappeared until he was just a man, sitting in a significantly reduced amount of liquid.

She reached in and grabbed Paul's hand. He grabbed back reflexively. She jumped back startled but held on. "Get medical here!" she ordered whichever crewman was closest. 

Still holding his hand, she checked his pulse, which was now existent. Hooray. She propped him up so his back was against the tub wall, still sitting in the liquid. Then she used her sleeve to wipe his face clean. His breath made little warm puffs against her fingers.

"You know, I'm really really really really really glad I was right," Tilly babbled. "Otherwise this would have been super awkward to explain to Doctor Culber."

Paul whimpered, then said, "This is super awkward."

"Yes but you're also alive, so that negates a lot of it."

"Why am I wet?" 

"I'm pretty sure your tardigrade DNA made you undergo cryptobiosis. So I had to rehydrate you. It was super gross."

"Oh."

He started slipping sideways into the liquid. Tilly kneeled against the tub wall behind him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders to keep him upright. "Okay, we're just gonna wait here."

Now that the adrenaline was fading, Tilly found herself slumping over her knees. Even as she let her head rest against the lip of the tub, she kept one arm wrapped around Paul's chest so he didn't tip over and drown. He weakly flopped his hand over hers and held on to her fingers.

The doors swished open and several medical crewmen rushed in, including Hugh. He stopped right after the doorway and stared at Paul as all the other medical personnel passed him by.

"You said cryptobiosis?" Paul asked Tilly, as he looked at his husband's stricken face.

Hugh ran over and skidded to a kneeling stop in the puddle of water surrounding the tub. He reached out and slicked back Paul's wet hair. On the other side of the tub, Doctor Pollard began scanning Paul.

"I'm sorry," Paul said to Hugh, even as Doctor Pollard grabbed his chin to direct his eyes towards her penlight.

Hugh shook his head. "No, I'm sorry," he cried softly. "We never even considered this possibility. I'm sorry you had to wake up in the morgue." Keeping his hand on Paul's shoulder, Hugh turned to Tilly. "How did you even think of this?"

Tilly winced. They were all going to watch the security footage, anyways. "Um....I realized he was trying to lick my sweat and I just kind of thought, what if it was cryptobiosis?”

Doctor Pollard gave a signal and everyone helped Paul stand out of the tub. He leaned into Hugh’s embrace. Tilly’s sodden uniform top slid down off his waist into the water with a splash.

Paul sighed miserably.

Hugh rubbed his back, “Fair’s fair," he said. "She’s seen my naked butt, now she gets to see yours.”

Tilly did remember seeing a very naked Hugh when he was resurrected by the JahSepp in the mycelial realm.

“We’re joking about that?” Paul asked, amazed.

“I didn’t need to see either of your naked butts,” Tilly proclaimed. “Or fronts,” she added.

Paul sighed again.

A nurse handed Hugh the sheet off the stretcher. He wrapped it around Paul and helped him lay on the stretcher. The entire team headed off out the door. 

“Go me,” Tilly congratulated herself softly. 

The room was too quiet. She looked at all the crewmen staring at her. “What? Like you’ve never seen a man be rehydrated?” she asked the room.

Her uniform top still floated in the tub. She used the console and dematerialized everything off the pad: water, tub and uniform. When it had finished its cycle, she had the system make her fresh clothes, since hers were quite wet. She smiled. She had an axe to put back, and tools to clean up; all unused, because her boss was still alive. Hooray.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where this came from. And I'm really kind of uncomfortable with the licking scene. Stupid handwavey science aside, I figured Paul has no strength with no muscle mass, so he can't exactly attack someone and rip them apart for the liquid in their body. All he can really do is lick someone's sweat. Still gross though.


End file.
